GLENDA JACKSON
(9 May 1936 - 15 June 2023)
The British actress and politician Glenda Jackson, who has died at the age of 87, was one of the most successful performers of her time. However, having reaped success in the entertainment industry, she gave it all up to become a Member of Parliament. Then, having been away from the limelight for over twenty years, she decided to return to acting and had further success in film and on stage. She appeared to have had a good life in both professions, collecting multiple awards for her performances and finding satisfaction in representing her constituents at Westminster.
Glenda May Jackson, one of four daughters, was born in Birkenhead on Merseyside to father Harry, a builder, and mother Nellie, a cleaner and barmaid. The family were poor but young Glenda was educated well at West Kirby County Grammar School and performed with the local Townswomen’s Guild as a teenage actress. Her first acting role was in J.B. Priestley’s Mystery of Greenfingers in 1952 with the YMCA Players. However, while working at a chemist’s shop in 1955, she won a scholarship to Rada in London. After two years she made her professional debut in Doctor in the House at Worthing and later joined the repertory theatre in Crewe as a stage manager. Initially she had difficulty finding acting work and even failed her first audition with the Royal Shakespeare Company. After several mundane jobs, she ended up as a Bluecoat at Butlin’s holiday camp in Pwllheli where she met her future husband, the actor Roy Hodges. They have a son, Daniel, a journalist, but Jackson and Hodges divorced in 1976.
Elsewhere it was bar work and rep in Dundee until she eventually joined the RSC in 1963 and was cast in Peter Brook’s production of The Marat/Sade playing Charlotte Corday. She went with it to New York and Paris and was in the 1967 film version. Jackson then stayed with the RSC for several seasons in plays by Brecht, Peter Weiss, and Chekhov, and in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra and US, the RSC’s response to the war in Vietnam. Apart from odd appearances in films and TV, Glenda Jackson’s first major film role was in The Marat/Sade. The following year saw her in Peter Medak’s Negatives, based on Peter Everett’s novel about a ménage à trois, with Peter McEnery and Diane Cilento, then Ken Russell’s Women in Love, from the D.H. Lawrence novel with Jackson as Gudrun Brangwen. Film after film followed - Russell’s biopic of Tchaikovsky, The Music Lovers, John Schlesinger’s Sunday Bloody Sunday with Peter Finch (winning her a Bafta), plus the television series of Elizabeth R, with Jackson as The Queen winning two Emmy awards. She also played Elizabeth in Charles Jarrott’s Mary, Queen of Scots (1971) with Vanessa Redgrave as Mary.
Jackson could do no wrong during the 1970s with appearances in Michael Apted’s wartime drama The Triple Echo with Oliver Reed and Brian Deacon, or playing Lady Hamilton opposite Peter Finch as Lord Nelson in Bequest to the Nation (aka The Nelson Affair), and being cast by Joseph Losey for The Romantic Englishwoman with Michael Caine and Helmut Berger (q.v.). Along with Trevor Nunn’s version of Ibsen’s Hedda, biopics of Sarah Bernhardt and the poet Stevie Smith, Genet’s The Maids and other movies, she made a real impression on the film industry. Perhaps Jackson’s high point in the 1970s was winning two Oscars, for Women in Love and Mel Frank’s A Touch of Class, a comedy with George Segal, which also won her a Golden Globe.
She then had an entrée to Hollywood and worked again with Segal and Frank on Lost and Found and subsequently with Walter Matthau in House Calls and Hopscotch. Robert Altman directed her in HealtH and she made John Irvin’s Turtle Diary from the book by Russell Hoban. For Ken Russell she was Herodias in Salome’s Last Dance and Anna Brangwen in his film of D.H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow. Jackson also carried on working in the theatre, in plays by Racine, Brecht, Lorca and O’Neill, the last being his epic play Strange Interlude, winning her a Critics’ Circle award.
From the early 1990s she decided to retire from acting to take up politics, running for Parliament with a seat in Hampstead, north London. A Labour Party activist, she settled into an MP’s work and was appointed junior transport minister by Tony Blair, even though she was not in favour of all his policies. In 2000 she ran for the Mayor of London, but lost out to Frank Dobson, one of Blair’s cronies, who was beaten by Ken Livingstone. Trying again in 2005, she too lost to Livingstone. After twenty-odd years in politics, she resigned in 2015.
It was then time for Glenda Jackson to return to acting. She had appeared in occasional plays while still an MP but in 2015 recorded radio plays based on the novels of Emile Zola and then the following year was back with a vengeance, aged eighty, playing the title role of King Lear at the Old Vic in London, and winning an Evening Standard and a Critics’ Circle award. Following that she won a Tony for a New York revival of Edward Albee’s Three Tall Women and then played King Lear on Broadway.
Television too beckoned with her role as a grandmother with dementia in Elizabeth is Missing, winning Jackson a Bafta and an Emmy award. In 2021 she made a romantic drama from Graham Swift’s novel, Mothering Sunday, with Odessa Young, Olivia Colman and Colin Firth. Just before she died, Glenda Jackson had finished filming The Great Escaper with Michael Caine, about a veteran who leaves his care home to take part in the seventieth anniversary of the D-Day landings.
Glenda Jackson will be remembered not only for her outstanding acting abilities but also for pursuing an alternative but successful career in politics for which her theatrical training stood her in good stead. Watch her in Parliament sounding off about some policy she didn’t care for and you can see how persuasive she could be. Was that the politician in her or the trained actress winning her audience over to her side? She was a caring politician and a shrewd performer who could convince in any role, be it a queen, a king or just mucking about with Morecambe and Wise on the box, something for which she will always be remembered.
MICHAEL DARVELL